This Week in Startups - OpenSea raises $300M, VW & Toyota commit $170B to EVs, China's strangled tech sector, New media | E1353

Episode Date: January 6, 2022

In this all news show,  Jason and Molly cover Toyota & Volkswagen committing a combined $170B to take on Tesla’s EV dominance (2:30), NFT platform OpenSea raising a $300M Series C at a $13.3B valuation (20:08), China’s tight grip on tech causing job loss and accelerating company closure (44:50), and how Ben Smith from the NYT is teaming up with Bloomberg Media’s CEO to launch a new media company (56:52). (00:00) Molly tees up the show (02:30) Toyota and Volkswagen pledge $170B to compete with Tesla (09:16) RealGoodFoods - Go to https://realgoodfoods.com and use code TWIST for $15 off! (10:49) Power of Tesla’s supercharging network, why Apple should have bought Tesla (18:55) Marlow - Get 15% off your individual or team memberships at https://getmarlow.com/twist. (20:08) OpenSea just raised $300M at a $13.3B valuation (36:03) Linode - Apply to their Rise program for founder-led, early-stage startups and get 3 years of discounts at https://linode.com/twist. (37:18) Jason teases his first NFT purchase (44:50) China’s tech crackdown is causing issues (56:52) Former CEO of Bloomberg Media is starting a new stealth media company FOLLOW Jason: https://linktr.ee/calacanis FOLLOW Molly: https://twitter.com/mollywood

All right, everybody, welcome to this week in startup's full news show today. We do have interviews on the way because I know you are missing them. We're just sort of getting the vibe. We're getting the vibe down as co-hosts, but, you know, we're going to talk to some other people going forward. Today, though, on the show, $170 billion going into electric vehicles combined by Toyota and Volkswagen. Even Sony, apparently, is going to make an electric car. We're going to talk about what is coming up in that market. OpenC just raised $300 million at a $30 million.

at a $13.3 billion valuation. So we talk about whether it's a bubble. And I think you can say, yes, it's a bubble because Jason just bought his first NFTs. And also that bubble just popped because Keanu Reeves might have just killed NFTs. Just kill my NFTs, Keanu. Jason's like, let me just have one day. Can I get a 10x before you kill them, Keanu?

Come on. Let me right now. Speaking of killing, China's tight regulation is killing their consumer tech industry. We wrap up then with Ben Smith. leaving the New York Times to team up with Bloomberg Media CEO to start a mystery new media company. And we play my new favorite game. Would you invest? Would you invest? It's going to be a great show. Stick with us. This week in Startups is brought to you by Real Good Foods is modernizing frozen foods

and has become one of the fastest growing food brands in the U.S. Everything Real Good Foods makes is low in carbs, high in protein, and made from real food ingredients. Go to Real Good Foods.com and use code Twist for $15 off. Marlow. Every founder should have a coach to help them become more effective at managing and leading their teams. Get 15% off your coaching membership at getmarlo.com slash twist. And Linode has a startup program built specifically for founder-led early stage startups. It's called Rise and it comes with a three-year discount program and 10-year discount program and

tech consultants to help with infrastructure growth. Apply today at Linode.com slash twist. All right. So today we have learned via various channels, including CES, because yes, that's happening, that a lot of new electric cars are coming to the market, mainly from Toyota and Volkswagen, which are going to invest a combined $170 billion to take on Tesla over the next decade. And also Sony. I'm sorry.

pause while you digest. My monitor fell out. I thought you said Sony was going to make new cars. Yeah. Sony. Okay. Sony, which apparently belatedly discovered that like nobody pays very much money for TVs anymore. And there are, in fact, there is an upper limit on how many PlayStation's you can sell.

Will it have a minidisc in the dashboard? Oh, man, I hope so. Mini disc was pretty dope. Mini just actually would be pretty, I mean, look, they're going to need something as a gimmick. so they might as well go mini-disc, I think. Yeah, they unveiled a concept car at CES, which is adorable, the Sony Vision S, which looks a little bit like, there's like one that looks like a Jaguar and one that looks like if a Maserati mated with a Model S, kind of, and said, sure, why not?

Oh, there it is. Okay, I see the pictures. Yeah, I skipped ahead a tiny bit in our rundown here. Okay, no problem. Okay, I mean, it's easy to make a prototype. We all know that. Yeah. So I give zero points for prototypes. Is this dashboard going to have like 8,000 buttons? I mean, Sony is not known for restraint in the number of buttons. I think people are going to be crashing these cars. I think so. I mean, if these cars ever actually start to exist. And so what is more interesting, what is certainly, this is like a fun flash in the pan. And to me, it shows the fact that, you know, companies of all stripes, certainly the fact that you have EV startups that aren't car makers all by itself is super interesting and shows.

the potential. The fact that Sony is like, maybe we could make some money here shows the increasing potential. And then when you start talking about dollar amounts in the hundreds of billions, and evidently, according to the Wall Street Journal, VW's CEO, and Volkswagen, of course, makes much more than Volkswagen's. Right. Talks about Elon Musk and Tesla so much that his employees are like, we got it. We got it. Well, I mean, Volkswagen also had the horrible scandal where they were faking their emissions, right? And they paid a huge fine. And then they got religion and said, okay, we're going to overdo this and go into electric vehicles. And this was always, Tesla's vision and Elon's vision was, we want to inspire people to make more cars. So I think it's

absolutely fantastic. And Tesla had a record quarter. And they overdelivered and the stock went up 10% this week or something. And they've got all those plants online. The gigafactories that are just like dreadnots, they just pump out, pump out cars. And then they're opening Germany and Austin, I think this year. So when those two things come online, my lord, I mean, the amount of EV production is going to go through the roof. And also Ford said their demand is so high. And I think it's very interesting to your passion for sustainability. I really feel like this was driven not just by the amazing efforts of Tesla. And, you know, that was obviously. obviously, you know, Herkulean in terms of getting, you know, breaking this wide open.

But I think consumers now really care about this issue. And when they go to buy something, whether it's an impossible burger or a car, or they're buying clothes, they're saying, how does this impact the planet? And that is pretty amazing if you think about the change, because in our generation, it was Gen X was kind of like, we care about this. and it maybe came into people's behavior. Boomers didn't really care and certainly not before them. And now I think this is the lens at which people make their decision.

And maybe all generations, they're actually making their decisions to spend more money than they need to to feel better about what they're doing on the planet. It is a remarkable shift. And frankly, I think as, you know, like Gen X would have and didn't have anything to buy. So to your point about Tesla, to the point about, this entire market. Like, there is a role for everybody to play here, including consumers, and they need something, they need somewhere to go. Like, I think launch as an investor in Ware Loom, is that right? Which is like a used closed marketplace. All of those things are

sustainability plays. Everything related to decarbonization or electric cars. And yeah, 100% people are willing to pay, you know, Bill Gates calls it the green premium. And he has positioned it as like, if you have a green premium for your product, it's death because people aren't going to pay more to go green. And it turns out that's just not true. Like people, there's a, first of all, there's a lot of money sloshing around in this economy and people are willing to spend it to signal, what does it, show me your budget and I'll show you what your priorities are. They're willing to spend it to signal what they care about. And I think actually that competition in the EB space is super exciting. Like if prices come down and more cars are available, but one thing I will say,

like, I'm really interested in these announcements. I've driven the Volkswagen ID4 a little bit. It has pros and cons. I like that they've done some really clever things with the design to sort of copy a little bit of the Tesla look. Like they've got neat LEDs that like they kind of like do like a kit car green when it's charging. And it's like the LEDs in there are really fun. I like that it's got a dashboard display in addition to the one in the middle. Like my, I think the S has a dashboard display.

but like the Y doesn't. It's just one big screen in the middle right. So I kind of liked having that. The turning radius is one gertrillion times better than the Y, which is like got the turning radius of the Titanic. The tires turn further in rotation or something? It's just tight. Yeah.

I mean, it's just making good turns. And it looks pretty good. It does not have the Tesla. Yeah. It looks like fine. Not for me, but it looks okay. So I'm super. So basically like my curiosity is what is what are these cars that are made by people

whose core competency is making cars going to seem like. Is it going to be a more car-like experience that's more comforting to people as opposed to like, holy crap, everything about this is different, which is a harder mainstream cell? Yeah. And I'm getting, just spoiler, I'm getting an E-Tron loner for a couple weeks. Nice. So that I can hopefully give my impressions.

Now, who makes the E-Tron? That's Ford. Audi. Oh, the Audi E-Tron. Which is Volkswagen, the Volkswagen family. Got it. Okay. And then like, yeah, I hope to try the port.

I'm just because I really do think right now, and even as a consumer who like, look, I'm obsessed with cars. So this is just speeding into the thing that I like to do. Tesla still is the only car that I would buy or tell people to buy because the range and the infrastructure can't be beat. And so when you have these car makers like Toyota talking about being here in 10 years, you've lost. Yeah, that's, yeah, it's crazy. That's bonkers. People don't understand the impact of the supercharger network. I think it's greatly underestimated.

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And a big goal of theirs is to support food banks across the U.S. by donating one million nutritious meals. So here's a call to action for you. Go to real goodfoods.com and use the code twist for $15 off. learn more about Real Good Foods at Real Good Foods.com and follow them on social. Real Good Foods. At Real Good Foods. Great job. Real Good Foods. Really enjoyed the product. I don't know if you've taken, have you taken road trips in your Model Y? I'm driven to LA twice. And driving to L.A. is such a delightful experience in a Tesla. You stop for, I have, I get 320 miles, I think, on my Y. And that's pretty accurate. I mean, if you go above 65, it obviously goes down a bit. But I stop once, which I like to stop. two or three times. I'm one of those guys who likes to stop and get a coffee, use the loo. Maybe I stop for a full lunch. And, you know, I just like a break. I'm like, I like the, I'm not the going for a record guy. But I love stopping at the Tesla supercharged with the 250 megawatt. It's a kilowatt. That 2501, it's great. I was getting 700 miles an hour added to the battery. And I was like, okay, that's more than I need. Yeah. I mean, I think you're absolutely right,

that that's like what consumers don't understand now and will start to understand is that that super fast charging is the silent advantage. Yeah. That I mean, I have heard tell that Tesla might start to open it up, but like right now it is really hard to imagine a car maker really truly catching up with people's range anxiety

without that infrastructure. And the ones who are saying 10 years or Honda, I looked up Honda just out of curiosity, because they were pretty early with hybrids. They're talking about an EV fleet by 2030. Yeah, no. I'm like, do you even care about the planet, bro? No.

That's just, you know what that is? And you've lost. That's them signaling, like, please don't regulate us or please don't give us too many fines. We'll buy the EV credits or whatever, the carbon credits. But I like this, we call it in the industry little big details. I like the fact that car manufacturers are really thinking about the little details of like, hey, Spotify.

I don't know if you saw the Tesla has Spotify in the dashboard now. Speaking of Spotify, we were talking about earlier. That's really cool. When you load your Spotify, you have all your playlist and everything ready to go. And then I don't know if you've tried this, but when I was in my Model Y and I was parked, and I wanted to fully charge it because I was going to an Airbnb where they didn't have a charger. And I was going to have to plug in the one-town. I was like, let me just fully charge us.

So I was going to be there for 45 minutes or something. And I was like, oh, my God, Hulu and Netflix. Yeah. I put on Hulu. I log in with my Hulu credentials and I'm watching live TV. Totally. And I was like, really? Am I really watching live TV?

Yeah. My son and I will literally go. There's like one in Emoryville that's by the kind of Emoryville food court, which has all this yummy food. And we will go and we'll pick our favorite foods and we will have a picnic in the car and watch Hulu and Supercharge. Because it's just like legitimately pretty fun. The entertainment factor is huge. Also, I've made that car fart every possible way that it's able to fart.

And I know that like, that's not a reason to love a car, but you can turn the horn into a fart. And it is so funny. Go look at the website, Little Big Details.com. Littlebig Details.com is a very cool website where these designers talk about little details that are completely unnecessary to put in your products, but that become this reminder that somebody at the company is paying attention. I just talked to a woman who calls it brilliant basics. And I was like, yes. Not bad. Not bad. Get the basics right.

Alliteration. Little big details is better, though. That is really charming. Little big details is just like this movement amongst designers to just pay attention, you know? Totally. And if you can give somebody a little taste. of considered, it's like being considered. It's like when you go to a great restaurant and they bring you like, you know, an intramizo or a little something, you know, with the check, you know, a couple of pieces of candy they made

themselves. All those little details add up to experience writ large. And, you know, I think that's what you're seeing for these automakers. But I think it's great. Yeah. I think it's excited about the competition. Do you really think apples in a maker car? I have put my $2 on it and never coming out.

Who's the kid? Kevin, who was doing the watch? and then was at Adobe before it. Somebody had doing Google search. Didn't they leave? Didn't they all leave? No, he went from Adobe. Then he did the watch.

I saw him on Halloween, just randomly ran into him, and said hi. And I was like, look, I bought your watch. I was like, the first three versions were unusable. But I said, but version six is really good. He's like, thanks, J-Cal? I was like, I'm saying it to you in private. I didn't say it on the show. I just did say it on the show.

But anyway, the first like three versions. I bought two versions of the eye. I watched the first and I think the third. And I was like, this is terrible. And I just gave it to my assistant. I was like, get this thing off my wrist. I'm going back to my Fitbit. And now I have version six.

And version six is amazing. So really great. Kevin Lynch. Thanks, Jay Sound. Kevin Lynch will not be on the program. But he is, no, he'll he might. Well, Apple famously doesn't. But Kevin Lynch, if somebody, I mean, they don't talk.

They don't talk. But he's in charge of the, was it, Titan Project? I think they were codenaming it. And so he's in charge of Titan. And obviously they did have a thousand engineers on this or a thousand people because you just saw all the names on LinkedIn. So I think Apple doesn't like employees to put themselves on LinkedIn, but you can't technically tell employees not to.

You can encourage them not to, I think. Yeah. I mean, I would have obviously seen. Like, don't put this on your LinkedIn. I don't, I mean, I don't think they're going to. At some point, it was like they had denounced that they were going to pivot it to make software for cars. Yes, the dashboard.

The dashboard, which fine. They have no choice but to spend $10. They have no choice but to spend $10, $20 billion working on it. I always thought Apple should have bought Tesla and I wrote a blog post. Apple should buy Tesla for $75 billion when Tesla was like $25 billion. And talk about a prescient post because now they're both worth $3 billion and a trillion. And I just said, can you imagine the Model 3 or Model Y in an Apple store? Like, you come in to get your phone and you see the Tesla there, it'd be like, game over.

How many cars would they sell? Honestly, if my Tesla, other than the various try to kill me issues that it does have, had car play, I would be the happiest girl in the world. Like, I don't want. It's nice that it has Spotify or whatever, but I don't want. I want to use Apple Maps. That's what kind of girl. Like, I'm just like, give me my own. That is a super challenge.

Oh, yeah, there's my piece that I wrote. I got to go back to these blog posts I used to write. Some of them are crazy. Seriously. And see, yeah. Check these out. Can I ask a question about CES? That wasn't canceled in the face of Omicron?

Can you believe that? The super spreader of all super spreaders is occurring right now? It is occurring right now. I mean, if I were a betting woman and I'm only allowed to bet in $2 increments, I would bet that they will have a 50% positivity rate at CES. I mean, it's just such a terrible. Everybody pulled out, but it was like too late for them. I mean, I almost have to feel bad for CES because it was such bad timing.

They were like, okay, we're bad. This is the big, but they really wanted to plow ahead last year, too. I mean, they almost had to be pressured to cancel it. And then it was sort of like it was too late. Exhibitors were already building. But then exhibitors pulled out. I mean, there's probably, I don't know, 85 people there now. Yeah, how do you get your employee, how do you force employees to go to CES?

I mean, it's hard enough to force your employees to go to CES just in flu season, which is when it occurs. Like, they're like, you know, it would be a great time to have everybody from around the world converge in the, most bacteria-laden city in the world. It's like an industry joke, the CES flu. Because we're always like, oh, we got the CES flu, of course. And now it's like, they're just, like, it was just too, it was too brutal to like start the year off with the flu. They might in COVID times want to consider a springtime show instead of a January

show. It's rough. Yeah, I don't get the, the January. I guess maybe it's January and Vegas is cheap. You can take over the whole city. They probably looked at the months and said, which month can we take over for the right price and own it? or it could just be a historical thing.

But yeah, that's kind of crazy that they did it. And then I just got a note from my school that like 40 people, I have Omicron, like 11 teachers, 30 students, whatever. And it's like, oh, my God. Like, this thing is really spreading, even in the Bay Area where people are. Oh, it's unstoppable. The most vaxed and the most compliant. Yeah, it's unstoppable.

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So go to getmarlo.com slash twist to get 15% off your individual or team memberships. That's get marlowe.com slash twist to get 15% off. NFT platform OpenC just announced a $300 million series C at a $13.3 billion valuation. The round is led by Co2 and the crypto firm paradigm. Remember, we covered OpenC employees front running, aka insider trading, would be another way to phrase it on featured NFTs back in episode 1283, they took action against that employee who was a top-level employee who was buying NFTs before they became available, which is what VCs and everybody else is doing. Insiders are doing as part of the process of supporting these, and I actually bought two

NFTs. I'll talk about that in a moment. We had OpenC CEO, Devin Finzer on episode 1255, really smart cat. And they mentioned a large part of this fundraising will be used, quote, to significantly improve customer support and customer safety because people have had their NFTs stolen as happens with any digital asset of value. They currently have over 60 employees on the customer support trust safety teams. They'll probably have to add a zero to that. And they in fact said they're going to double it. And yeah, I bought two NFTs. So I'll talk about in a moment. So open C's transaction volume increased 600X

in 2021. So one transaction now equals 600. Wow. That's bonkers. Over 900,000 wallets have been made, I guess, at their site with at least, have made at least one transaction. 900 wallets have made at least one transaction. In each of the last three days, there's been over $240 million in trading volume on OpenC. I'll give a note about trading volume that could be painting the tape where people sending NFTs to each other for any kind of nefarious reason.

So just keep that in mind. Thanks to Richard Chen, who set these monitoring dashboards up on Dune Analytics. Here you can see the volume. Since OpenC takes 2.5% of every transaction, they took an estimated $81 million in revenue on $3.2 billion in volume for December. That is a very small take rate compared to the 30% that Apple takes and the 45% of advertising that YouTube takes. Yeah, good point. Just something to consider there. They could probably take 5% or 10% or 7.5% and probably see no change.

What's interesting, well, so what's interesting about OpenC is that just as a pure matter of business, that it is smart to have set up a marketplace to sit in between creators of NFTs and potential buyers of NFTs. They're taking a small enough cut that they aren't driving people away from the platform. and in order to popularize a new technology, it does help to have an easy retail location. Yep. And this is like literally contrary to what people want NFTs to be. Right.

The existence of OpenC is like anathema to a lot of the true believers in what they're calling Web 3 and the idea of these decentralized technologies that take, you know, away from, I mean, what OpenC has. has become in some ways is a bit of a gatekeeper. If you have to find the NFT there, it has to be listed there in order to buy it. Not obviously, NFTs can exist anywhere, right? But if you want to buy it on OpenC, it has to be listed there. And they froze some of those assets after there was theft. And it is unquestionably a centralized marketplace for a decentralized technology. And so it is, I wonder if you think that the pushback against this from a

philosophical perspective is actually a business risk for OpenC. Yeah, I mean, it just shows how Web 2, the existing paradigm, is better for most consumers. People want something that's easy to use, trusted, and in a place where somebody picks up the phone when something is stolen or a transaction doesn't occur. The overwhelming majority of consumers, like 90%, want to have a place that's trusted where there is customer support, where there is central authority. when involved in a transaction. There are a small number of people, early true believers,

who want this to be more complicated, or maybe they don't want it to be more complicated, but they'll accept it being more complicated in order to have nobody as an intermediary. Which is the word I'm using for middleman now. So non-gender specific. So if you can remove the intermediaries, that is what Web3 is about.

And people keep dunking on OpenC for not having that. Well, at the same time, consumers kind of want it. And they're willing to pay that 2.5%. They're willing to pay the Vig because it adds a level of sustainability to the service. It's not going to go down. There's a group of people keeping it up and running. But Bitcoin doesn't have an OpenC equivalent, right? I mean, maybe Coinbase you could consider.

Coinbase, I guess. Maybe you could consider being an equivalent of it. But it is a huge risk as a business that somebody could make an easy to use. permissionless, you know, non, with no intermediary. That is a business risk, I think. But if they keep the 2.5% low, who cares? That's like what visa charges restaurants, right? Or a master card.

So it's such a small take rate on such a large amount of money moving around that I think they'll be fine. And they're obviously making, if they're making 80 million a month, that means they're making a billion a year, a billion a year. And, you know, going, and they're growing 600x if it grows even just 3x year over year, that would support this 10 times, 13 times run rate valuation. So I'm always doing that math in my brain, you know. And there are these questions about if NFTs turn out to be a bubble can OpenC maintain that

valuation. And the fact is open sea and centralized marketplaces like it, I mean, I'm sorry, I'm not trying to commit sacrilege here, but they're actually the key to making sure it isn't a bubble. Like it will be mainstreamed and become something that if you're NFT curious, and you can go and shop like a nice looking marketplace and be like, oh, yeah, I would spend my money on this digital piece of art, especially if there's an asset attached to it. And maybe even if there's not. Like, people legitimately like art in lots of forms and aren't that worried about. I'm not even really particularly down on NFTs, even though they're probably also a bubble right now.

But, you know, realistically, you have to accept that if they're going to become mainstream and not disappear as a bubble, not just pop, it will probably be as a result of centralized market. places because the people who really care about decentralization don't usually seem to also care about UI. They're willing to deal with, yeah, that poor UI, poor user experience in order to, you know, have it be cooler and not control by anybody. You can use Netflix and Hulu and Disney Plus or I guess you could use BitTorrent if people are still using it and like, yeah, I'm sure there are tons of people using BitTorrent to watch movies or whatever, or it's like, okay, for 12 bucks, I can watch the book of Boba Fett.

And I have a beautiful interface and I don't need to go to, you know, the pirate bay or whatever to and get like seven kinds of malware and all of the other things that go along with that. However, I will say this conversation is completely moot. Yeah. Because NFCs are over. They died. Oh.

They died at the hands. Oh, I didn't get the news flash. They died at the hands of America's beloved Keanu Reeves. Oh, really? Okay. Well, do we have any tape of him murdering them? We do, I'm afraid. We do. During an interview with The Verge, Keanu Reeves, was asked his opinion about NFTs that were made for the Matrix Resurrection film, and they were so popular they crashed the website that they were sold on. And so here is a 41 second clip of Keanu Reeves being informed of and responding to the NFT question. Did you guys see the Matrix NFT thing that they did for resurrections just a couple days ago? They made NFTs for the new movie, and there were like 100,000 of them, and the site broke, like, in the first few hours because there were over 300,000 people in the queue trying to buy these NFTs for $50.

And so, like, when you think about the concept of digital scarcity and things that are, you know, they can't be copied that are easily reproduced. Well, but they're not the same, right? It's not fake version of you. I wonder what are, do we get a cut of that? Oh no, actually, I don't think we're in them. They probably did other people. You don't have to take that up with the studio. Yeah. I know that journalist.

Yeah, he got the, I guess the Matrix interview. That was fantastic. I mean, just to the folks at Warner Brothers, if you're going to sell a bunch of NFTs and get in on the grift and secure the bag, you might want to get the two lead actors in the film. Cut your talent. Yeah, maybe give him a cut. Cut your talent.

So they can say totally awesome. It's the future as opposed to we didn't get any. It's stupid. This is the direct quote from Keanu Reeves, echoed by Beard script in our chat right now. They're easily reproduced. Yeah. And then you left. Womp, womp.

They're over now. They're over. And I guess the counter argument would be, yes, people can go take a picture of the Mona Lisa. Actually, maybe you're not allowed to take a picture of the Mona Lisa. I think you're not. No, you could take a... The last time I was there, you could take a picture of the Mona Lisa. So you can take a picture of the Mona Lisa and have your own one-of-one photo and put it on your desktop

where any number of copies of it, you don't own the Mona Lisa. People buy tons of art that could look just like, like, if you don't, if you are not a super serious collector, like, I have a friend who's an interior designer. And every time we go somewhere, like, oh, there's a new mid-century restaurant in town. And she's like, replica, replica, replica, replica, not replica, replica. I cannot tell. Right. I don't know that those things are replicas. they're good enough for me and having the original would make me feel good even if I knew someone

could make an exact replica. Like, frankly, NFTs in that regard are no different from the physical world. It's just maybe easier to replicate. I feel the same way. I would very much like to see a corvette made from like the 1960s or 70s and make it electric and put in all the new stuff. And I don't want to own the old one because I want all the new tech. Yeah. When they made this new electric Mustang, I was talking to an executive at Ford and I was like, you guys blew it. How are you guys like so clueless? Take the original Mustang pony car that everybody loves on the show. That's iconic. Yeah, Ford's off the show. That's so iconic. Yeah. And make an electric version of that and make a limited edition of 10,000

of them and number them. And it literally could look like that cherry red convertible pony car, but it's got perfect brakes and all-wheel drive. So you can drive it in bed, you know. I would sell my house for that. Exactly. And instead they made a weird mom car, which I'm into because I'm a mom, but it's not a Mustang. It's too much of a mom car. You're a mom who would like to have something that is not 5% evocative of a muscle car. You would want something that is 100% evocative muscle car.

It's a heartbreaker. It is a real weird use of the Mustang brand. That Mustang car is so ugly. I don't know if we can pull up a picture of it. I was like, I had a, my first car was a 73 Mustang Grande. I had a 68. Yeah, you had a 68, okay. Yeah.

And like this is, looks like. It's not even a mom car. I don't know what that is. Did they make like an ugly BMW like that had that like weird. I'm not an SUV, but I'm not a sedan kind of. They call those crossovers, right? Yeah, crossovers. The X1 is a little bit like that, but this is like got some weird Audi lines.

Like, it's too sharp. It's just not right. It's not right. And then to put a Mustang logo on that is. just an insult to Mustang fans everywhere. Like, seriously, the worst job ever. Like, that's a Ford Taurus. That's a Ford Taurus. That's a Ford Taurus. That is still a beloved brand. Like, people like it. And then you wouldn't have to dilute Mustang. That is a, that is more evocative of a Taurus. You're welcome, Ford. It's a Taurus. Take the logo off the front and put

a Taurus logo on it. I think it would sell better if it was a Ford Taurus. People did love their Ford Taurus's, right? Yes, call it a Taurus show, which is the Taurus race car. Okay, I am off the rails in the car department, I will go on. I didn't know that, oh, wow, this is another thing that we haven't come. We're both into muscle cars. I really wanted to buy a, like, another, you know, 70 to 73. I love those 70 to 73 Mustang. She would pull up the 73 Mustang Grandin.

Love it. With the vinyl roof in gold. That's what I had. What it for 650 bucks in Brooklyn had a hole in the floorboard. So with a passenger could see the road. It was like, you know, really cool augmented reality feature before. So fun. reality. It was like rusted out. And I almost died in that car. There would be known this week and

Starves. Yeah. The Chevy Nova was, I think, notorious for that too. Yeah, I had my, I inherited my grandparents 68 Mustang. Wow. What color? And was it convertible or hard? Blue and it was not a convertible. It was hard top. It was the, you know, I mean, it was like not even the three on the tree. Like, it was the straight six. It was the grandma version of the 68 Mustang, but oh my God. Yeah. That's incredible. That one is like a mock one. You can see what the racing stripes. That's not what I had. But that is the 73 style, which is the entire front of the car is a 351

Cleveland engine that when you hit the gas, the car would tilt up because there was so much power. And we put a four-barrel carburetor on it because we were looking for stuff to do. And we figured out how to change a carburetor and we put a four-barre carburetor on instead of two. It went from like 11 miles to the gallon to like six. But the noise that this thing made was

unbelievable. There's a company now that's turning classic cars into EVs. And I'm so here for it. That's my car. Mustad. Yeah, that's like the mustard color. That is spectacular. It was awesome.

So I want, there's a convertible version of the 70 to 73 iconic. And people don't like this one. They love the pony car. Yeah. But this was when muscle cars peaked, which was 70 to 73 right before the oil crisis in the later 70s, they just kept saying, how much bigger could we make the engines? And this was peak like three, five. 51 Cleveland craziness.

It's incredible. It's incredible. Incredible. And there's like a little... The Gen Z, I will say, like, we love the 60s. The Gen Z is all about these 70s era cars because they're a little bit more recent history. And if you think about, like, the generations always love, you know, two back or something. They love their parents, 80s, Volvo's, the sob.

Yes. Remember the sob convertible? Was it the Volkswagen Cabriolet? Like, that was like the sorority girl car when I was growing up. Was that like convertible? I bought one of those when I moved to California. It was the girliest car I'd ever. ever had, I named it Babs. I was like, I don't even know who I am right now. I had a white cabriolet

convertible. I mean, but those are good times. Those are good times in California when you take the top down to drive to San Francisco from the East Bay. And you drive up the one like into Marin. I mean, I was just like, who I wanted to write a letter to my 14 year old self and just be like, hang on, honey, because it gets amazing. Literally, you grew up where? Montana and North Dakota. Right. So like literally. because they would just crack and fall in. Yeah, and nor did you have any, yeah, you didn't have a ocean, not a lot of coastline. You could cruise in your Mustang along the Missouri River listening to the last point soundtrack,

which I was a big fan of in high school, but not quite the same. Not quite in the same level. All right, let's keep the show moving. Cloud infrastructure costs are one of the biggest expenses for startups, and they're also some of the most unpredictable. It's no wonder that many startups get lured to the major. cloud providers with the promise of all these free credits only to wind up locked into unpredictable cloud bills and outrageous costs. I've had this happen myself. Well, Linode is here

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sponsoring all these great startups and for the Rise program. It's really a great service. And it's great that you're of service to the startup community. I really appreciate that. Linode.com slash twist. Oh, oh, and then I just wanted to say I did buy two NFTs for $11,000. Oh, yeah, tell us about the NFTs, to the extent that you can. They have assets attached to them. They're not just... So, you know, I think NFTs for art are cool, but I'm not like a huge art person. And I think people who like collectibles, sure, I see it. I do think some of these things are ridiculously overpriced, obviously. However, I think... NFTs as a way to show your membership in a club, like the Board Ape Yacht Club and some of these

things, if there is a real world component is interesting. So a very notable founder who I've known for a long time, who has like really great connections in the entertainment industry, and I'm going to leave it at that top level there, has created a series of NFTs and a company. So I invested a little bit in the company. I think I put 50 or 100K into the company. And I, you know, when I'm trying to learn, placing a bet is a great way to learn. So placing a small bet of 50s. 50K, you know, it's like if you lose it and you get an education, you know, as an investor, you got an education, right? And it focuses your energy and your attention on this project. So that's why I did it. Small bet, not like a, you know, million dollar or three million

dollar bet, which we make a lot at the syndicate.com and at launch. And then they were like, hey, and by the way, here are the NFTs. There are going to be this many. If you would like, you can buy up to two of them at the original price. So we're not front running the market, but because we're investors, we do get an allocation in those, which I think is fair, if you back the company. It's not like the public's not going to get the bulk of them. The public is going to get the bulk of them. But it gives you access to a series of real world events, I'll leave it at that, and as well as online events. And when you take the $11,000 price, if this event keeps occurring for, you know, I don't know, a decade, five years, whatever it is, man, it's

going to be so worth it to have this level of access. And I think the $11,000 ticket would grow to like $100,000 in value or something. So I was like, okay, we're going to put $50K in, we'll put $22K in this. And then I'll let the people at our company enjoy those events, I guess, as a little perk and to also keep an eye on our investment. So I'll leave it at that. The announcement will come in a couple of weeks, I think. It's so interesting. I know. Yes, somebody pointed out that I'm not 100% sure that's not front running. But, no, it's an allocation. So it would be like, front running would be the sales happening tomorrow. I work for the company. I bought them ahead of time. And nobody else had a shot at them. But I guess you could call it that.

I mean, in this new world, it's an allocation, I guess is how they're saying it. Right. So if you invest in the company, I'm going to be a patient. Preferred stock, right? If you were to invest in the company before it went public, you would have an allocation already. So I would put it in that genre. Or let's say you invested in a restaurant and they were like, you can have a reservation

before we open the reservations up to the public. Right. What is interesting, though, is that it's a thing that's being, it's like, it's described as an NFT and a digital asset and a blah, blah, blah. And what it really is, is like an early subscription to a, series of events. And if we could just figure out how to break down the NFT language in a more accessible way like that, that's a good tip for your company, right? Which is tell them that what this really is is a token for the subscriptions and the whatever and the whatever.

It's a membership. It's like so a membership. That's not hard to understand. Yeah. So this is an NFT membership. Other people have NFT art. Other people might have NFTs for rights. And I think for me, the NFT rights and the NFT memberships are interesting. The art just personally not as, But I like the rights one. So imagine you were a stock photographer, right? And you went out in your cabriole, it's 25-year-old Molly, and you took a bunch of pictures of the one. And you opened them and you, and I wanted to actually back this company. So if somebody wants to build this company, I would back it.

Or I should say, we would back it. You go take that series of photos you took. You upload them to, you know, NFT stock photography.com. and you say they're all 50 bucks. Each photo is 50 bucks. And we get 20% of, if you resell it, we get 20% kickback. And then any use in commercial use of the photo, we get 20%. So then somebody who's an investor could say, I think that photo is going to be making a lot of money.

It's an iconic photo of the Golden Gate Bridge. I'll pay 50 bucks for it. And then it gets bought because somebody wants to use it in a campaign and they pay $2,000 for it. And now you've made your money. And then the person. who's the artist or the amateur artist is like, okay, I made some money to pay my rent this month and I have back end,

as opposed to selling it to Getty as work for hire or something. Yep. Yeah. I still think that there is actually a fair amount of potential when it comes to art and digital creations and because collect, look, collectors are a breed. They really are. And they will pay for a lot of stuff that we don't necessarily think is worth the money. No.

But it's not for us to decide. No, I mean, listen, I'm watching all the time. I'm Alexis O'Hanian is like buying Nintendo cartridges. Right. And I'm like, if I found a box of Nintendo cartridges in my house, I throw them right in the garbage. Like, get this out of here. Or I might like, you know, donate them somewhere. And like, he's putting them into plastic boxes and figuring out what the condition is and they're trading them on eBay.

I'm like, really? You guys are trading cartridges for Nintendo. There's got to be a billion of them. It's just worth what people will pay for it. And people will pay, if they'll pay for Beanie Babies, they'll pay for NFT art. And we will pay for Mustangs from 1968 to 1970s. Oh, yeah. So much.

It's all my house. My house is on the line. It's not really. It's not. If anybody in the audience can tell us about these electric cars that are being made from previous ones, if I could buy a 19, you know, like a muscle car, electric car, I might buy that if it was. This company was like in the New York Times.

Like they totally exist and are doing it now. Yeah, we'll find that. I feel like, I just don't want to buy something that's going to be like a maintenance nightmare. That's my nightmare. It's like, I don't want to have to like do too much maintenance. Right.

But if it was an EV and it's like no maintenance, that is amazing. That's the thing that's kind of cool. You get rid of the transmission. You get rid of the engine changing oil, changing whatever. And you just have to deal with tires. Like all the hoses were rotten on my 68.

If I could just get rid of that as a concept, like amazing. Amazing. Oh, by the way, we're going to do a NOTI gang NFT drop. So we're keeping track of all the NOTES in a spreadsheet. And I'm going to give,

Noties. You can get in this to Mali and producer Nick. We'd give them nicknames like OG Bobji. And then if they make themselves notable in the Notie gang, we will make an NFT of them and air drop it to them. Or just send it to them for free. I guess it's not taking an air drop. So I'm going to make a series and I'm then going to hire an artist and we'll have you send in your photo or we'll just make a character of you and then we'll send you your own NFT. How's that for a crazy, grifty idea? We don't make any money on it, but we just make the Nodie fans rich. Yeah. In the immutable record. I mean, they'll be worth like, I think they'll be worth like $10 and the gas fees will be 40.

I know, yeah. Like, what would it cost to give it? Somebody educated us at producers at This Week in Startups.com of what would cost to send somebody a free NFT? Like, I think that one ends up costing you $50. All right, let's keep going. is pretty fascinating. I think what is happening in China as that country cracks down on these companies that have been built up and there's been a lot of excitement about the tech industry in China. And as China cracks down, it's also having this sort of side effect of killing the

spirits of entrepreneurs in that country. And so this is a New York Times world, a New York Times article by Lee Wan. I'm hoping I'm pronouncing your name correctly. She writes the new new world column at the New York Times. The crackdown is killing the entrepreneurial drive that made China attack, a tech, power, and destroying jobs that used to attract the country's brightest. So we covered this many times in the show with China cracking down, and Tencent is down 28 percent. Alibaba is down 49 percent. D.D. is down 65 percent of these public companies, New York Times, quote, in place of the pride and ambition that dominated a few years ago, fear and gloom now rule, as many tech companies lower their growth targets and layoff young,

well-educated workers. Also, China's been cracking down on video games, as people know. They're limiting play to three hours a week as discussed on all in episode 45. And China hasn't given out a new gaming license since July. And so this was something I predicted. I said, you know, like, who wants to be an entrepreneur if Jack Ma disappears? Like, this is beyond like Jack Ma got taxed 70%. There was a wealth tax, you know, the stuff we're fretting over here in the United States.

or it's difficult to open up a factory and so, you know, Florida is easier, or Texas is easier or I don't want to pay the incremental tax in New York and California, so I'm going to move to a low-tax state. This is, I'm going to be disappeared. Disappeared. And re-educated. And potentially re-educated and made to say, I'm sorry. So who in their right mind, if you're an entrepreneur, if you think about the entrepreneurial

mindset, these are very smart-driven individuals. And they're savvy and they see opportunities. and they have great strategy and their ability to understand systems. That's what the entrepreneurial mindset does. They conceive of some opportunities, some product or service. They think about the system, the world in which they're going to put it out there, competition, consumers, pricing, all these dynamics. Well, if one of the dynamics is the government is going to crack down on me, you might

actually, if you're a savvy entrepreneur say, this is not worth it. I'm going to find something else to do or get out of this country. Yeah. This is fantastic. For America. This is a gift on our doorstep that an authoritarian country had massive success. And I think the mad king, Xi Jinping, the mad king, it rhymes. So that could stay.

Love it. I think Xi Jinping, the mad king is losing his mind for fear of losing control of the country. That's always been my theory. For five or six years, I've been saying, like, and we got to pull this clip I did Nick, producer Nick on CBC when I said I would never invest in China because it's so opaque. they could change the rules at any time. And I said this on CBC six or seven years ago. I got laughed at by the other anchors and some other commentators.

And I said, listen, you know, this is an authoritarian country. Like, oh, you don't know what you're talking about. Alibaba is selling this much. I was like, how do you know any of those numbers are true? Right? Like, how do you actually know? And they kind of laughed me off. And it's understandable that they did because the trajectory was they're going to be this hybrid

of authoritarianism and capitalism. And it turns out those two things cannot coexist. long term. You need democracy and capitalism so that the democracy can hold capitalism accountable and capitalism can drive the country forward and, you know, have an impact on the democracy in a positive way. Authoritarians eventually are going to be like, this is too much competition, right? And that is 100% what is happening in China, is that the central banks are saying, hey, I don't know if you noticed, but Alibaba and Weechat are out here offering loans and financial services and doing credit checks and allowing payments. They're taking over

the role of the central bank. They're even talking about creating digital currencies that will compete with you on. Shut it down. And in the United States, you might have that fear about, you know, if you're the Fed chair and you have that concern about Bitcoin, you can't do anything about it. You're not allowed to, right? You can call a hearing. You can propose regulation. We can create laws. You can take action against bad actors or you can create a competitive. And you can also, you know, if somebody breaks the rules, you can say you broke the rules, we're going to go after ripple. Like that's, you know, a security. It's not, obviously it's a security. They controlled it and it has no use in the world. So like it feels more like a security to me. But yeah, I think this is.

And what's so interesting about the entrepreneurial point, too, is that a lot of these young people in China grew up under the experiment. Like they're young enough. If you think about it, like China has been this kind of been, had been moving toward this sort of hybrid for over a decade, right? So let's hear. I would say more. It's more like 20 or 30. Yeah.

Right. And so they don't. There were probably young entrepreneurs in China to whom it never occurred that the government could step in and say, okay, now we monitor everything that you're doing. Like, sure, they had some sense that, you know, yes, there's the party. and yes, there are certain things that we take for granted in terms of like we don't have individual freedom and we're being surveilled all the time. They didn't realize that the long arm of China could come in and just shut down the company and shut down the industry and say like,

nope, it's gone now. And so you can imagine that disillusionment is going to be massive. And countries like the United States with a stronger entrepreneurial ecosystem can only benefit. I agree. It's a really interesting point because there's an entire generation there who thought they were trending towards embracing the West and maybe being part of the global community and they would be able to ring the bell and have an IPO and they'd be able to travel freely to the United States and be a hero and be on the cover of magazines

and now they're realizing, nope, tall poppy syndrome, you are just one, you know, be in the hive. There is no individualism. Your individual success, your individual effort is not as important as the collective good. And that's going to be, that's the stuff that of, well, I think that's the stuff that ferments a revolution. And it's unlikely and the Chinese could stomp out a revolution like they ran over their own people with tanks in Tiananmen Square or they arrested students and took over Hong Kong and shut down. I mean, they've shut down the Hong Kong rebellion.

Yeah. They got rid of the Apple. Yeah. And they arrested all the journalists. And so this is a great wake up call for people in China. And I think it's great for the West. It's like we didn't. have to beat Russia, they beat themselves, right? The USSR beat themselves and now China's beating

themselves. This is what happens in communist and socialist countries more often than not. They wind up beating themselves. All right. So apparently, so our producers found it, the CNBC clip of Jason talking about how you cannot bet on the future of China. It's 90 seconds from 2016. Nobody has any real clarity on what's going on in China. Remember, this isn't even a democracy and you have a company hanging out there, you know, sort of growing in a large way that the SEC is trying to figure out what's going on. So for any of us to try to pretend, we know what's going on in China

and with their economy, which has many thumbs on the scale and a lot of manipulation and a ton of corruption, and then try to understand what's going on inside of a company that's a high-growth internet company. Very hard to have any kind of transparency

or insight into this company because it's kind of a black box, China, right? And so I would be very careful owning stocks like these. That being said, obviously they have a tremendous business. and you know they're they're moving towards operating like an American company with a lot more transparency and the SEC is going to force them so it really is an interesting test case I think Jason though I mean obviously there's a there's a cultural barrier there's a language barrier there's a currency barrier for New York and US investors to understand this company but if they're

willing to lay out that specific guidance 48% revenue growth year over year in 2017 and more transparency about the company is that enough to make you feel confident or at least comfortable? Yeah, I wouldn't be comfortable owning anything in China in a place where the government can round up, you know, the press and put them in jail for what they say. So, yeah, no, I wouldn't, I wouldn't feel comfortable owning the stock. I wouldn't feel comfortable operating in China. It's a very challenged environment.

You have to be a high-risk investor. I would be very careful owning the stock. I would own it only under, you know, a small, small, small percentage of your overall diversified portfolio. Fascinating. Wow. Fascinating. Sometimes they get it right.

If you say enough things. I looked up Alibaba's stock price today. So at the time that you were talking in 2016, it was about $77. Okay. Today, it's $122. So in five years, you would have made some money, yeah. I mean, I don't know, compared to Apple or Tesla or, you know. It would not have been a great bet compared to Apple or something.

That's not a great, yeah, that's not a great rise. I mean, I also take the point, though, of the person in the chat who did head jobs, who said, like, don't sleep on China. You don't want to underestimate because, for example, the USSR is gone, but Russia still has a massive amount of influence in the world and in our discourse and information and, you know, is aligned with petrochemical giants like China. They can still be a massive economic force, but in terms of an entrepreneurial disruptor, yeah, probably do themselves. You know, I think what, you know, people are very, we're very optimistic at that time about China. and I think I looked at it and said, and I think the reason I was able to make that call is, I believe that when you set up a game and it's rigged like China is, eventually somebody is going to cheat or take over and that's what we've seen happen.

And it could be cheating on the side of Alibaba or the executive team in Alibaba or it could be Xi Jinping, the Mad King could decide, you know, hey, I'm going to change the rules of the game. Whereas in America or a democracy, you know, it's really hard to cheat. You can cheat, but you're going to get caught eventually, and there's a lot more scrutiny. It's not perfect, but it certainly leagues better than operating in an authoritarian country. If you look at Russia, they're desperate to be relevant, and petrochemicals are becoming less and less relevant. And I think what we're seeing is the dying, the death throes of a dying empire. That's what we're seeing in Russia. is like, okay, we have this other mad king with some nuclear bombs and a bunch of oil and, you know,

the ability to hack people and create misinformation. Like, what are their assets, really? Oil, nukes and a really, really sharp group of KGB agents who run the country who know how to do sciops and hack. That's literally what they're good at. Like, that's not a great future for the people of Russia. And China, though, does have a lot of positive things or how. a lot of positive things with this entrepreneurial golden goose that they just slaughtered. They literally

took the golden goose and they are re-educating it and torturing it in a prison somewhere. Really stupid stupid decision. It's also only good news for not to belabor the point, but it's also only good news for America's tech giants because for years I've been saying that I'm sort of fascinated by China as the only place that has incubated behind the Great Firewall competition to Google or Facebook, right? You have Baidu, you have Alibaba, you have these massive companies that don't exist at that scale anywhere else. And had they unleashed them on the world, the way that we've unleashed Facebook and Google on the world, you would have had this like clash of the Titans. Yeah. Because no one else could potentially compete. If we chat had truly come to America,

what would that have meant for Facebook. Well, I mean, look at TikTok. I mean, TikTok, all these kids are addicted to TikTok. Like they're, they're capable of building world class products and they're just not going to be allowed to. So go democracy. Okay. Let's wrap up with this. media story. Let's do it. Okay. This is a media story, but I want to present it to you as part of my BC education as like a founder question. So the story is that former New York Times columnist, uh, sort of. He's still there for some period of time. And BuzzFeed editor in chief, Ben Smith, is joining this new totally unannounced media company started by Bloomberg media's former CEO, Justin Smith. So it's two white guys named Smith because that's media for you. Not related.

Not related. Ben Smith confirmed to the Wall Street Journal that he would be a shareholder. They're going to do this new company. Here are, it's currently called Project Coda. There was, I thought, a quite devastating and perfectly executed piece in the Wall Street Journal, or I'm sorry, in the New Yorker by this interviewer Claire Malone, asking Ben Smith over and over and over and over. Like, what is this company going to do? What are you going to cover? Well, where are you going to be based? Like, what do you think is the goal? Who do you want to reach? Who's the audience? What are the beats? What are the topics? And at every point, he was like, either it's premature to talk about that or we don't know yet. So there's like, so nothing about this exists. And Ben Smith actually got weirdly testy at the prospect of being at, like he sort of ended the interview. I was like, I got to call my kid.

Just text me if you have any more questions. Yeah. So then, and then Justin Smith said when he was asked by the Atlantic, why are you starting this new venture? He said this, quote, he's always talked about a. market of 200 million college-educated English-speaking professionals throughout the world. And the big bet he's making is that they're more like each other than their individual countrymen, which doesn't make any sense to me at all. So this is where-

They define their total addressable market as 200 million college-educated. So smart, college-educated people, I get it. I saw it after demographic, English-speaking, but they're global. So they could be in China, Hong Kong, Australia, London, wherever. but they're college educated and English speaking. I get it. But to be fair, when Ben Smith was asked about that, he was like, well, maybe it's kind of global, but it's also going to be very much the U.S.

Got it. Okay. Yeah. So English first. It's not going to be. English first. That is all we know. English first, some news.

So this is a scenario that I think venture capitalists have encountered before. Because you made the point that clearly somebody has thrown some money at these guys and Ben like start a thing. That was my guess. Every five to ten years in my estimation, Some very rich person looks at the media and says, you know what, I can fix that because I haven't been successful running Amazon. So I'll buy the Washington Post and I'll fix that. Or I created eBay on Piero Midiare.

So I will then go by, I will start the Intercept and I'll give them $100 million. Or I'm Benny Off from Salesforce and I will buy, you bought Time, I think, or Newsweek? One of those two meetings. One of those. Somebody will search for it. Or I am Lorraine Powell Jobs. And I bought the Atlantic. I will buy the Atlantic.

And so these become playthings for the ultra, ultra wealthy billionaire set. Yeah. Who like to look at problems and say, I can solve them. And the media is always had challenges. And you think I can make this better. But they always underestimate is what a persnick. hard to manage, opinionated,

hyper-intelligent, difficult group of people journalists and editors are. That's true. And then they try to manage them. Like they're managing their authoritative, authoritarian, you know, Salesforce or Amazon where these things run

just completely differently. Yeah. And it's like Hollywood has a very similar process where people become billion, And I remember my friend Mark Cuban started making movies and buying movie theater chains and, you know, Sony went and bought Columbia Pictures and, you know, all different, uh, Jeff Scholl, my friend, uh, you know, got into movie making and did participant. So, you know, people get attracted to these two different places, Hollywood and the journalism. And they're very different animals.

And here's what I want to know is like, there's this idea of the known founder and so that you might be willing to invest in a known founder, even if the idea isn't fully fleshed out yet. Sure. And so then this is, I guess, my question. You've got these. So one of them was the CEO of Bloomberg Media. The other was editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed, which had a pretty successful IPO. And, you know, really did remarkable things going from, I'm sorry, not successful

IPO, but did grow from listicles to like a natural newsroom, and successful product. Successful product. Yeah. And then you read an interview like this that is literally like, we don't have a, we don't, we don't, we had don't have a clue. Would you put money? Are you into this? Is this something you would put money into?

No, I mean, media is a terrible investment traditionally for investors because it's low margin. It doesn't scale gracefully. If you look at something like BuzzFeed, it has three or four hundred million in revenue or something. And they're worth like 600 million.

I don't know what they're I mean, we went over this in the show. I do remember that. Pretty brutal, the outcome. And they're hard to manage businesses. And the only way to get scale is to add more brands together. And adding more brands together makes it more complicated.

So Jim Bankoff will bought Weblogs Inc for me is running Vox, a collection of all these brands. Incredibly hard to have the Vox people and, you know, the Verge people and whatever other assets they have curbed in one house of brands. And this is a vanity play. What happened was Justin Smith was talking to some very rich person while in the ham this is my guess Justin Smith is talking to some very rich person

who he's covered before they're in the Hamptons or they're at some dinner and he says yeah you know they're talking about like why can't journalism be better why can't it be this and what did I and this person who's got billions of dollars says you know what what are your ideas is oh I think we should do this I think we should do that and he says yeah you know I'd love to

give you 10 million dollars to seed that idea or Pierre Omidyar gave was it was it number 250 million he was willing to fund the intercept up to I don't know if he gave all that money up front. But a lot. It was a lot. It was nine figures. It was shocking when it came out. Now, I think it was 25 million over 10 years or something was his idea. But that's what happens with these things. And, you know, why not back the person? If you, if this is a rounding error for you as a, you know, like Washington Post is for Bezos. If it's a rounding era, sure, when I give

a shot, what I will say is be careful when you're a billionaire and then you make a bet on a publication you get in the news business. When Bill Gates did MSNBC, which was Microsoft, the MS and MSNBC is Microsoft, and they were going to combine with NBC, and I went to the launch of that at the Rainbow Room in New York, and the idea was they were going to do this synergy where they were going to converge news and the internet. Right after Bill Gates did that, and he started covering everybody on MSNBC, that's when he became like, you know, public enemy number one. And, you know, Washington Post gets bought by Jeff Bezos. and then all of a sudden he starts getting a lot of heat. When you own a publication, the amount of heat that comes to you as a rich person is crazy

because then you'll be in St. Bart's and Washington Post will write a story and then you'll have your little party, your dance party for the 70s like, you know, Bezos did. And then somebody's going to, one of your famous CEO friends is going to come and be like, you guys just wrote a story about me. Right. And it's got 17 factual errors. And now the whole vibe of the party's killed. This happens over and over again.

be careful if you're just unsolicited advice to billionaire. Stay out of the news business. It's not worth it. All your friends are going to hate you. All your friends are going to hate you. They're going to hate you. And then you're going to have people who work for you who hate you because you're going to call them up and say, hey, Justin Smith.

You know, I was just talking to Rupert Murdoch and you wrote the story about him and he said these seven facts are correct. They're like, no, it's not. They're totally correct. And we have these inside sources. You're like, oh, well, who did you talk to? We can't tell you our insight sources. Screw you.

And then all of a sudden, you're like in the middle of a bunch of content. v. cantagorous journalists who want to prove their independence, and now they're going to go twice as hard as your friends at your friends. On the topic of free speech, I feel like we should kick that very meaty conversation to tomorrow and tease ahead to it. Because you have, I think, correctly identified one of the biggest trends of 2022 is not going to go away, which is this conversation about what kind of conversations people can have and where. Should we go ahead and say, stay tuned for that tomorrow? Yes. We'll talk about getter and Joe Rooker tomorrow. Tease it. Tease it.

We're doing it. Because I can't talk about Joe Oregon today, man. I need another cup of coffee for that. Good God. He's a comedian people. He's just a comedian who loved Howard Stern and is like the new Howard Stern interviewer. And he's good at it. But he has very controversial people on.

You don't need to agree with everybody he has on. And just because he has them on does not mean they're right. Correct? Do you need to say that? Like, he's going to just put anybody. He's good friends with, who's the guy, the crazy guy who said all the column, not the Columbine, the Sandy Hook people were a false flag. Oh, Alex Jones.

Oh, God. I mean, that guy's the worst human being on the planet. And he's like a performance artist who says children were not murdered when their parents are burying their children. And like, then Joe Rogan has him on his pod all the time, apparently. Yeah. Many times. Yeah, and he's friends with him. And I get it.

He's a comedian. He's friends with a performance artist who's weird. But, I mean, at a certain point, Joe Rogan's got to pick better friends. Like, like, just that guy should be out of the friend circle. Why would he? It's making tons of money. I guess. I mean, I do like some of Joe Rogan's interviews, I guess.

I think he's a pretty good interview. I don't know. I don't know. It's not my jam. But we will talk more about it tomorrow. And all the things that he wants to be able to say unfettered tomorrow on this week in startups.